chapter
13 
The Gamma Camera:
Basic Principles
Radionuclide imaging is the most important
application of radioactivity in nuclear medi-
cine. Radionuclide imaging laboratories are
found in almost every hospital, performing
hundreds and even thousands of imaging pro-
cedures per month in larger institutions.
In this chapter, we discuss briefly some
general aspects of radionuclide imaging, and
we describe the basic principles of the most
widely used imaging device, the gamma
camera, also known as the Anger scintillation
camera, named after its inventor, Hal Anger
(see Chapter 1, Section C and Fig. 1-3). The
performance characteristics of this instru-
ment are discussed in Chapter 14. The use of
the gamma camera for tomographic imaging
is described in Chapter 17.
A.  GENERAL CONCEPTS OF
RADIONUCLIDE IMAGING
The purpose of radionuclide imaging is to
obtain a picture of the distribution of a radio-
actively labeled substance within the body
after it has been administered (e.g., by intra-
venous injection) to a patient. This is accom-
plished by recording the emissions from the
radioactivity with external radiation detec-
tors placed at different locations outside the
patient. The preferred emissions for this
application are γ rays in the approximate
energy range of 80 to 500 keV (or annihilation
photons, 511 keV). Gamma rays of these  1950s with the introduction of the rectilinear
energies are sufficiently penetrating in body
tissues to be detected from deep-lying organs,
can be stopped efficiently by dense scintilla-
tors, and are shielded adequately with rea-
sonable thicknesses of lead (see Fig. 6-17—soft
tissue has attenuation properties similar to
water). Alpha particles and electrons (β par-
ticles, Auger and conversion electrons) are of
little use for imaging because they cannot
penetrate more than a few millimeters of
tissue. Therefore they cannot escape from
within the body and reach an external radia-
tion detector, except from very superficial
tissues. Bremsstrahlung (see Fig. 6-1) gener-
ated by electron emissions is more penetrat-
ing, but the intensity of this radiation
generally is very weak.
Imaging system detectors must therefore
have good detection efficiency for γ rays. It is
also desirable that they have energy discrimi-
nation capability, so that γ rays that have lost
positional information by Compton scattering
within the body can be rejected based on
their reduced energy (see Chapter 6, Section
C.3). A sodium iodide [NaI(Tl)] scintillation
detector (see Chapter 7, Section C) provides
both of these features at a reasonable cost;
for this reason it is currently the detector of
choice for radionuclides with γ-ray emissions
in the range of 80-300 keV.
The first attempts at radionuclide “imaging”
occurred in the late 1940s. An array of radia-
tion detectors was positioned on a matrix of
measuring points around the head. Alterna-
tively, a single detector was positioned manu-
ally for separate measurements at each point
in the matrix. These devices were tedious to
use and provided only very crude mappings of
the distribution of radioactivity in the head
(e.g., left-side versus right-side asymmetries).
A significant advance occurred in the early
scanner by Benedict Cassen (see Fig. 1-2).
With this instrument, the detector was
scanned mechanically in a raster-like pattern
over the area of interest. The image was a
pattern of dots imprinted on a sheet of paper
by a mechanical printer that followed the
scanning motion of the detector, printing the
dots as the γ rays were detected.
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